Hi all, Over the past days, a couple of BOINC on Android clients have been released to the public, which is great. My problem is the total lack of documentation. Other than the --already outdated-- Android FAQ (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Android_FAQ), there's nowhere where people can look up what does what, or how to set up things so they work correctly.
The Help menu in the Android BOINC client goes to the general http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/BOINC_Help page. On that the first sentence says that there's a separate Android FAQ. In the Android FAQ, under the header of "Where can I get help?" it says that people should go to the BOINC Help page, where the first sentence states that there's the Android FAQ. Yeah, that helps. Then further on that BOINC Help page, it says "For other questions, try: " - The BOINC forums. - The BOINC FAQs. - Advanced FAQ. The BOINC forums are getting to be a catch all for people to go to, but the experts that know about all stuff BOINC on Android are everywhere but for on the BOINC forums. Other than Claggy, I haven't seen anyone else with experience come to the rescue of people with questions, and while I have tried to answer a couple of the questions myself, my heart and experience lies with the main BOINC client, not with the Android version. Since I write all of the BOINC FAQs, I know that there's exactly nil FAQs in there that are of help to people with Android BOINC. With my plans of moving the FAQs to a Wiki, and then immediately updating and rewriting the lot of them, there's precious little time I am going to spend into adding stuff I know nigh on nothing about and have no interest in at the moment either. The Advanced FAQ also has no help when it comes to the Android BOINC client. There is no special page that goes out of its way to explain all the ins and outs of the Android client. There are no installation instructions. There are no screen shots. There is no in-depth explanation of what does what. There is no manual. There isn't even a readme file. The forums had the question already on how a user can delete leftover remnants of BOINC after he did an uninstall but had a data directory presumably still filled with work (https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=8949). I answered to the best of my knowledge, mostly of conjecture and guesswork. In https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=8954 we have a person seeking help and knowledge, as his BOINC client seems to be doing work, but none of that is recorded in his messages in the event log. Hands up for anyone wanting to explain that? GUI messages, anyone? I never heard of them. And then there's a GUI log level switch with which you can set how much of the GUI messages you want to see, with nowhere an explanation on what they are for, or in the end, what to do with them. Or does the client send them to the development team unseen? I myself had the question a while ago why my phone wouldn't get work, which turned out to be caused by BOINC on Android requiring to use the default venue, and that it just plain refuses to do anything when the venue is something else than ---. A little known fact that isn't documented anywhere, not even in the Google email list that's used for the development of that BOINC. I know, I searched. So, who is going to write some nice documentation about this thing? Something with loads of large screen shots, in-depth explanations on which button/slider does what, examples of setup, how to skin it, how to attach to an account manager, how to use the GPU, what the messages in the GUI Messages tab mean, why this BOINC can't make use of the SD card, what happened to the stop button, how to remove the data directory when there is still data in it, etc. etc.? The most simple programs on Android have some kind of built-in Help, explaining in short what the app does. Why doesn't BOINC? NativeBOINC has a useful site, with screen shots of how to install and what does what. http://nativeboinc.org/site/for_users BOINCOID (rest its soul) had some screen shots, with some explanations. http://boincoid.sourceforge.net/ Power to Give has a great FAQ. http://www.htc.com/www/go/power-to-give-faqs/ As does Power Sleep, albeit only in German. http://www.samsung.com/at/microsite/powersleep/faq.html Both though have more information about requirements, what it does and how to use it, than the whole BOINC Android FAQ has. Are you going to expect that the volunteers step up again to write the documentation, put something on a variety of external pages, probably never to be updated again? Or do you hope that it's me doing it? As I said before, it ain't me that's going to do it. I have kept far away from the development of this thing, mostly because I wasn't interested in it, but partially because I saw this trouble ahead. This isn't the first time and will not be the last time, that something new or updated gets released and that the documentation is nonexistent or lags very far behind. The weirdest thing of all is still that when something gets added to the back-end, it'll get documented up the wazoo, preferably even before there's a single line of code written about it. So why can't that same level of zest be used to write the documentation about the clients? You want to give out a good product, and with that belongs good documentation. You want BOINC to be available for even the least computer savvy people. Thus you need good documentation that shows those people how to use it, how to set it up, what it actually does, and how quickly it will wear out their expensive hardware and data bundle. Please don't wave that off as something unnecessary. With thanks, -- Jord van der Elst. _______________________________________________ boinc_dev mailing list boinc_dev@ssl.berkeley.edu http://lists.ssl.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/boinc_dev To unsubscribe, visit the above URL and (near bottom of page) enter your email address.
